I’m going to give you a hard concept to get your arms around: It’s the concept that there are people in this country who want to intentionally collapse our economic system.

How could it be that any American would or would want to do such a thing? Well, those involved sleep just fine at night because they tell themselves that they’re not collapsing, they’re transforming — transforming — America into something better.

The progressive movement in which these people are involved started around the turn of last century. These are the same people who gave us the Federal Reserve. They brought America the concept of redistribution of wealth through the progressive income tax, telling Americans at first that only the rich would be affected. They are the same people who felt that they knew better about your health than you did that they needed to force you to stop drinking alcohol-through Prohibition. They brought us the League of Nations, then the United Nations. And their biggest contribution of all: They brought the understanding that our Constitution was a flawed, living, breathing document and that our Founding Fathers were a group of rich racists.

Now, today’s group of progressives do not speak the same language as you and I do: Economic justice is taking from haves and giving to the have nots; social justice, to quote Mark Lloyd, is when someone needs to step down so someone else can have turn, and transforming America means collapsing the state as we know it and rebooting it as a progressive utopia.

None of the language is the same. What I would call socialist, they call social justice. That’s critical to understand; they really believe they’re making things better and they’re about to finish the process.

They learned from their earlier failed attempts to transform America and the world, like the League of Nations.

First, there can’t be a debate. They simply declare the debate over and that they have consensus already.

Second, they can’t conduct their transformation in the open.

And third, they can never let a good crisis go to waste.

Now, as we discuss this, keep in mind that you’re watching all of this through your eyes; you see this as trying to collapse our economy. But progressives see this as a fundamental transformation — something better than we’ve ever had — as promised by Barack Obama:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, OCT. 30, 2008)

THEN-PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE BARACK OBAMA: We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

So, let me introduce you to the people you would say are fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system: Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy. Something else to remember is that this isn’t some conspiracy theory that we’re tossing out; they wrote about collapsing the economy and how they planned to do it in the article they co-authored in the ’60s called, "Mobilizing the Poor: How it Could Be Done." Six months later, it was published in The Nation, under the title "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty."

So, just what is Cloward-Piven? Well, remember the tree:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GLENN BECK: The roots of the tree of radicalism and revolution: It’s Saul Alinsky. It’s Woodrow Wilson, that’s how it’s all made legitimate, it’s progressive …

BECK: Here are the roots. Here’s SDS — this is for that "Democratic Society." Cloward and Piven come in and say, wait a minute, what we should do is collapse the system on its own weight …

BECK: Cloward and Piven — they’re using the same tactics: fear and intimidation of SDS. Cloward and Piven — overwhelm the system. And look who the president has: Wade Rathke right up the tree, Dale right up the tree, Bill Ayers right up the tree, Jeff Jones right up the tree …

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Simply put: Cloward and Piven were radical Columbia professors in the 1960s who believed in "change" and "social justice." Inspired by the riots in Los Angeles in 1965, they wrote and published their article which outlined the best way to bring the kind of Saul Alinsky-type social change to America. In their estimation, it was to overwhelm the system and bring about the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with impossible demands and bring on economic collapse.

Cloward and Piven instructed activists that if a crisis did not exist, promote or manufacture one by exaggerating some unthreatening predicament. (Global warming anyone? And to an extent, health care?)

Their methods worked … for a while. From 1965 through 1974, due to the strategy and efforts of Cloward and Piven and their followers, the total recipients on welfare rocketed from 4.3 million to 10.8 million. In 1975, there were nearly 1 million welfare recipients in New York City alone. That year, New York City declared bankruptcy. The whole state nearly went down with them.

In 1998, as he was still trying to deal with some of the fallout 20 years later, Mayor Rudy Giuliani referred to the Cloward and Piven strategy, describing the economic sabotage:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, JULY 20, 1998)

RUDY GIULIANI, NEW YORK CITY MAYOR: This wasn’t an accident; it wasn’t an atmospheric thing; it wasn’t supernatural. It was the result of policies, choices and a philosophy that was embraced in the 1960s and then enthusiastically endorsed in the City of New York.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

He went on to say: "This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare."

In the end, it didn’t work because Americans became horrified with the welfare-state situation. As a result, Cloward and Piven and their devotees learned that they needed to be in the system — we’ve shown you how they’ve done that.

The stimulus bill was written in large part by the Apollo Alliance, whose alumni include Van Jones. In New York, the Apollo Alliance is headed by Weather Underground co-founder, Jeff Jones, partner to Bill Ayers in the radical terrorist group and in whose living room Barack Obama launched his political career in Chicago.

We’ve shown you that George Soros is the source of funding for so many of these radical groups and that Soros and Jeff Jones went into one of the poorest sections of New York and gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of our stimulus money.

Throw in TARP — a massive, inexplicable bailout that America didn’t want for people Obama himself described as "fat cats". And, by the way, you have the progressives in the Republican as well as the Democratic Party to thank for that.

A trillion and a half dollar health care overhaul that less than 36 percent of the American people want, but Obama along with House and Senate Democrats are forcing on us. They say it will only cost us a trillion dollars because of the savings they’ll get by making cuts to Medicare at the same time they’re expanding Medicare and Medicaid.

Medicare is a program with a $74 trillion liability already. Again, the idea is: Get as many people on government assistance as possible. Does it sound like that’s what’s going on here?

This latest class of progressives have taken Cloward-Piven to a whole new level. TARP money to people who don’t deserve it; if you’re a bank and you can’t figure out that some of these people you’re handing out loans to shouldn’t have the money, you don’t deserve to continue to exist. But Barney Frank and others threatened the banks to give out risky loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Even the guy who signed off on TARP — a progressive himself — George Bush, warned that tighter restrictions and regulations were needed for Fannie and Freddie … not once or twice, but 17 times. The stimulus package with millions going to fund non-existent projects in districts that don’t exist.

Frank and Dodd learned the Cloward-Piven lesson in the ’70s: You have to be a part of the system to make it happen — they certainly are part of it.

Now, I suppose you could say this is all nothing but conspiracy nonsense. Well, again, here’s Rudy Giuliani saying it back in 1998 — long before I’d ever heard of Cloward-Piven:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, JULY 20, 1998)

GIULIANI: This wasn’t an accident; it wasn’t an atmospheric thing; it wasn’t supernatural. It was the result of policies, choices and a philosophy that was embraced in the 1960s and then enthusiastically endorsed in the City of New York.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

After the nation tired of able-bodied welfare recipients taking money from hard-working taxpayers, Cloward and Piven turned to other methods to overwhelm the system. They formed voter registration groups, like Human Serve, and worked with Project Vote, a group tied to ACORN, in their efforts.

And John Fund reports that Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer are about to introduce universal voter registration: If you’re on any federal roll, you’re automatically a voter. Receiving welfare, food stamps, if you own a home or are unemployed, you’re automatically I — we’ll talk about that more later this week. But make sure to ponder that: If ACORN can automatically register everyone, that just might explain why members of Congress don’t care about their poll numbers. This is the same ACORN already indicted for voter fraud all over the country.

Cloward and Piven lobbied heavily for the "Motor-Voter" law, which is widely blamed for getting so much deadwood fraud onto our voter rolls: Invalid registrations signed by the dead, ineligible or non-existent.

In 1993, when Bill Clinton signed the Motor Voter Bill into law and guess who was there as the invited guests of the president? Richard Cloward and his wife, Frances Fox Piven — who is currently an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Then, three years later, they also supported the Clinton signing of the welfare reform bill in 1996. After working so hard to create an entire class of permanent welfare recipients in America, why would they publicly support the signing of a bill that put new restrictions on welfare recipients? Was it just a signal to the far left, saying, hey, don’t worry, they won this battle, but we have the godparents of welfare excess right behind me. Don’t worry, we’ll win the war.

This was the same kind of signal to the far left that Senator Tom Harkin sent when he said the Senate health care bill was just a "starter home" — we’ll put on the additions and do the remodeling later. It was the same signal Obama sent to the left when he announced he was committing more troops to Afghanistan and then in the next breath, said he was also bringing them home in 2011.

Just because you and I had never heard of this motley pair until recently, don’t think for a minute that they haven’t been heroes to the left for years. Bill Clinton knew exactly who they were in back in 1993 and, no doubt, long before.

You may not have even heard much about Saul Alinsky until recently, but Hillary Clinton wrote her college thesis on him. And even if you had heard of him, you may have just assumed that all Americans felt the same way about him as you did — repulsed?

You’d be wrong again.

Here’s a statement, made just a couple days before Christmas from Chris Matthews, that shows us that we’re not all on the same page:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, DEc. 22, 2009)

CHRIS MATHEWS, MSNBC ANCHOR: Back to one of our heroes from the past, from the ’60s, Saul Alinsky

(END VIDEO CLIP)

So, as for the case for progressives overloading the system — on purpose — to bring about what I would call systematic failure and catastrophic collapse, but what they would call "fundamental transformation" of America?